More on the bio-fuels boondoggle

MORE pie in the sky on bio-fuels. It is reported that factories to convert maize or sugar into ethanol or Soya and sunflower into diesel will cost R1billion each. Guess where the money is to come from? You are right! The poor bloody taxpayer.

It is certainly not going to be anyone else's money -- unless a wave of madness overtakes the business community.

The public are likely to have to cough up in the end because the whole thing is a political idea -- back-of-cigarette- box economics rampant. To grow bio-fuels; to manufacture bio-fuels, you will need a licence. Why? If it is such a sure thing, why not let the market get on with it? Left to themselves, businessmen might put bio-fuels plants near farmers who grow maize/sugar/Soya or sunflowers who produce it most cheaply. Can't have that, now, can we?

Nope. All this maize, Soya, beet or whatever will be grown, by government decree, on two million hectares of under-utilised land in the former homelands -- in other words, where the agricultural skills and transport infrastructure are most lacking: where the roads are all crappy and all the men have bunked off to the mines because agriculture is women's' work.

This is the brilliant idea of the same department of agriculture that once proclaimed that everyone in South Africa should have equal access to land: forty million South Africans and about one million hectares to go round. I feel sorry for the poor suckers who get their 500 hectares in the middle of the Gariep Dam.

But bugger property rights, never mind our crumbling transport infrastructure, logistical efficiency and security of feedstock supply, this is a GOOD IDEA. Government is going to provide incentives -- the solution to the flaws in all such schemes -- incentives being the code word for more taxes. You can be damned sure that the incentives proposed will be too small or too big. Either way the man in the street is going to get screwed, just as he was when Sasol, Secunda and Mossgas were launched.

Does anyone out there remember what happened to the cotton industry and the tea growing industry when the IDC pulled out ? And when mandatory purchases of these products were stopped? . Nothing happened. They are dead. Government is already talking up the idea of a 15-year subsidy to a bio-fuels industry. What goes around comes around.